mike rivera

Steven Bartlett asks James Talarico how Texas chases “equality” without chasing off figures like @ElonMusk. Talarico’s answer: Musk’s net worth is a “spiritual sickness,” and the rich should pay something closer to the 1950s rate of 90%. BARTLETT: “What would you have done to stop [Elon from becoming a trillionaire]?” TALARICO: “We at one point in this country, we had, I think it was in the 1950s, had a top marginal tax rate of 90%. I don’t think it needs to be that high, but we used to have a political system and an economic system that more fairly distributed the fruits of our labor.” “And I think the thing that really upsets people, particularly about the Elon example, is that Tesla was successful because of taxpayer dollars, right? Tesla got investment from the federal government, which is why it has been so successful.” CONTEXT: The taxpayer dollars Tesla received were a LOAN from the Department of Energy in 2010. Ford got $5,900,000,000, and Nissan got $1,400,000,000 from the same program. But Tesla did something those automakers hadn’t. It repaid the full $465,000,000 it had borrowed, with interest, 9 years ahead of schedule, becoming the first automaker in the program to pay its loan back in full.